Is there a Visual Studio F# Express? Is there free stuff for F#?

I get that question infrequently, it is a good question though. And the strict answer is no, there is no Visual Studio F# Express. Now the BUT!

There is no Visual Studio F# Express, BUT you can make a type of Visual Studio F# Express yourself, and generally it is faster than using Visual Studio C# Express. You use the VS2010 Integrated Shell and then install the F# CTP. However, if you already have VS Pro or VS Ultimate on your machine then you won’t see it, the integrated shell will integrate itself into the existing VS Pro or VS Ultimate.

Good point, and I hope everyone takes a look at the URL. The site as of 5/3/2011 is not a spam site.

Not sure why you would use another IDE, like icsharpcode, the Visual Studio Stand-alone and integrated seem to work fairly well and are extensible. Then again, I didn't give it a try. I would recommend that PP India do a YouTube video (no more than 3 minutes) explaining why icsharpcode IDE over other IDEs (perfer if you did it against Eclipse initially).

But it certainly looks better than Eclipse and if I wasn't so heavily invested in Visual Studio, I might have a positive impression of this product.

My recommendation would be to focus on F# since there is no "Express" version. Your competition as far as I can tell is C# Express.

Installed. It does seem very limited at the moment. only console projects with the monodevelop plugin. and it isn't standard in the current version of mono. "Following the open-source release of F#, Mono developers have announced that they will be including F# as part of standard distribution in the next long-term support release – Mono 3.0. Current versions of Mono already include some F# components, but were not tested with other tools such as F# plugin for MonoDevelop. Therefore we recommend using Mono 2.8 and installing F# separately…"